Allison Katz at Gio Marconi/Milan

Allison Katz
AKA


Gio Marconi
via Tadino 20
I-20124 Milan
Italy
www.giomarconi.com



11.02.-25.03.2016


Images courtesy the artist and Gio Marconi
Wanted Dead and Alive   
You said you were struggling with a title… All Is On is a hard act to follow, Allison 
AKA however makes perfect sense as a postscript  
Rider, tailpiece, coda. The Also in AKA, something more to say, multiplicity, in excess of, urgently 
While select imagery and techniques are repeated, the artist is never repetitive  
(Repeating is fate & proves the subject is unstable. It demands of me as I demand of it)  
(Also known as) preceding nicknames and pseudonyms, proposes a continuum of alternative identities as addendum. A standin for an originator. Alias as real extensions  
The paintings themselves occupy the space of a moniker (What do you mean?)   
Architecture is the abstraction, the paintings are the figures  
I love how it works as an abbreviation which insinuates this back and forth that, am I right in recalling, you’re going to design the exhibition as a two-way route that will be read both forward and backward? So AKA as a palindrome…  
Whereas the artist separated her forename into syllables to create the title ‘All Is On’ – the very pronunciation of which reverberates as an affirmation – here the act of naming is advanced upon by Katz’s apt recognition of the rotation of her own initials in AKA  
Permutation and Allusion   
Unfinished business  
Keep CPR in your pocket for another time  
Right-angled outcrops run the course of the gallery so that from one direction some are made visible while concealing others, which from the other end of the space are then made apparent. The paintings cannot face each other  
Primordial cringe  
architecture: seen and unseen simultaneously  
Walls as screens. There have been in the past actual folding screens and other examples of freestanding walls, used each time as a way to get at the work from a different angle, literally  
And Ms. Katz, the whole Schrödinger’s Cat link is a beautiful metaphorical conundrum for the alive/dead cycle of painting too – existing in limbo. At worst it returns zombified. At best, it is resurrected, brimming with life. In your poster a dog watches a cat split into a quantum koan of simultaneity. Who can have eyes everywhere at once? Anyone with the wish  
Acronyms as hymns. IRL  
Mobile and pure repose. Not only my POV but equal to my body 
  
Saim Demircan and Allison Katz